I completed 11 DIY projects in 2015 🙂

Between the end of November and the end of December I made roughly 20 stained glass stars! I gave many out as Christmas and Hanukkah gifts, and kept 8 for Jim and I to hang in our living room window. I made them in a variety of colors and textured glass.

Last week my friend Michelle posted on Facebook that her friend Joe needed to find a new home for his male rat Franc. Apparently Joe has to travel a lot for work, so Franc got lonely. But Franc is SO cute and so sweet… hubby agreed we could adopt him. This morning at 9 I picked him up and this afternoon I got him all settled in our spare large cage.

This weekend I created 3 new stars for our living room window. I dressed them up with pre-tinned copper wire to make them look like snowflakes. Pre-tinned means it’s already been dipped in solder so it saves me the headache of trying to lay an even layer of solder over it. It’s very easy to hold the wire designs with needle-nosed pliers and solder them to the stars.

Birdie is awesome. Enough said.

Abbie warned me a couple times that the stained glass spider web I made in October was probably too heavy for the hooks I added in November, since they were soldered directly to the copper foil border. She wasn’t kidding! Today I took the web down to my workshop and barely applied any pressure before the hooks peeled off, taking the copper foil with them.

Not something you usually see in the same sentence, but my weekend was all about caulk and stars, and yesterday poor Bonkers had his butt shaved to remove gobs of greasy mats. This past weekend I caulked for the FIRST TIME EVER! It’s another DIY milestone. I also made 8 more stained glass stars 🙂

60 feet of LED holiday lights strung up with a silver star garland in the downstairs hall + 40 feet of LED holiday lights strung up in the basement workshop! And some festive disco balls thrown in 🙂

I love my basement workshop [basement cage], but there’s only one light. I have my main workspace right under that light, but while I’m stained glassing I am working on 2 workspaces and one is pretty dark. Today I went to Home Depot and picked up a work light and hung it from the ceiling, via 2 extension cords, some copper wire, and a bunch of red twine.

I’m on a roll! Holy cow. I made a raspberry one last night before bed, a garnet/blood red one this morning, and a smaller, clear glass polka-dot/bubble wrap looking one this afternoon. The clear one was for hubby’s boss’s wife. We went to a surprise party for him at his house and I decided to make a star for his wife [who I’d never met] as a hostess gift. She loved it 🙂

NINE DARK MOONS

I am ALISON, aka Nine Dark Moons. Welcome to my little corner of the world! I hope you will stay a while & read some stories about my DIY projects, my creative exploits, and the adorable animals that cross my path.